> If the change of which you speak is not the shift in the meaning of factoid from its initial one to the new one, what is it?
An extension of meaning. Sure, if that became such a dominant usage, it's possible to imagine a world in which the very meaning of the suffix could get wrenched entirely into a new denotation: at that point, 'humanoid' might come to denote 'a small human-like creature'. I can't see evidence of that yet. But I think I do see evidence of language change producing an additional denotative sense for 'questionoid' (through repeated connotative association with the context of 'small'.)
By the way, if anyone thinks this is a trivial word to be loading so much attention on, it's mainly of interest to me as I said above: it's quite rare to be able to pin down language change until well after the event - like the old favourite 'nice'. It is also worth noting that language change often happens at the margins: amongst young people, non-invested people, and through language collision processes. I think this is such a case. <shrug> could well be wrong, of course.
